Mary Hardy is an anthropologist with over twenty-five years of experience as an ethnographer and a qualitative researcher, working in a range of communities in California, and in a peri-urban squatter settlement in Mexicali, Mexico. Her BA thesis at Hampshire College was an ethnographic video on the bikini circuit in LA, entitled “Girl before a Mirror.” For her UCLA graduate advisor, she filmed and edited a documentary entitled “Let’s Own It” about the Venice Lincoln Place Tenants Association’s fight to stay in their homes. Currently, she’s working on an ethnography on the politics of body/mind and emotion among older current and former heroin users in California. She descends from an eccentric slew of Irish Catholic working-class people, many of whom struggle with addictions (to alcohol, heroin, food) and mental illness. Her main areas of study are drug use, drug policy reform, and addiction, health and healing, gender and family systems, and social inequality and political resistance.For over ten years, she’s been teaching introductory courses in cultural, linguistic, and physical anthropology at West. Mary loves West and is happy to be part of Westfest.